Access to Cash in Canada

For countries experiencing ‘less cash’, it is becoming normal to measure the distance people must travel to access cash from an ATM, or in Canada’s case and automated banking machine (ABM), or branch of a financial institution. The Bank of Canada has released a paper describing its travel- based metric and the results ¹.

The average Canadian must travel 2 km to reach their nearest ABM and 4.5 km to their nearest branch. 90% of Canadians live within 5 km of an ABM, and 84% live within 5 km of a branch.

The total number of ABMs in Canada increased by 3.7% between 2019 and 2022, and overall access to cash remained stable in that period. At the same time, the cash share of transactions in Canada (by volume) has decreased, from 33% in 2017 to 22% in 2021. While not necessarily related to this, the total number of branches decreased by 5.2%, mainly in rural areas where the decline was 7.2%. Rural Canadians already have less access to cash: they need to drive an average distance of 4 km to the nearest ABM and 9.6 km to the nearest branch, each distance twice the national average.